James Carlos Blake, whose savage, lyrical novels about outlaws, bootleggers and gunslinging murderers resurrected the violent history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, drawing comparisons to titans of American letters like Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, died on Jan. 12 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.
His brother Rick said the cause of his death, at a nursing care facility, was pneumonia.
Mr. Blake, the descendant of a 19th-century English pirate who was executed by a firing squad, was born in Mexico but grew up in a Texas border town. There he learned that some forms of violence — in his case, decking racist classmates who called him a “greaser” — had a certain nobility.
Rebellious, nomadic and prone to divorce (he was married four times), Mr. Blake was nearly as colorful a character as the ones who populated his fiction. Before turning to writing full time in his late 30s, he had been a paratrooper, snake catcher, mechanic, swimming-pool maintenance man, jail officer and teacher.
“The more experiences a writer’s had in his earlier, pre-writer life, the luckier he is, because those experiences will compose the main well of insight he has about life, insight that of course has plenty to do with the degree of truth in his work,” Mr. Blake told Firsts, a magazine for book collectors, in 2001.
Mr. Blake published his debut novel, “The Pistoleer,” in 1995. The book reimagines the life of the Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, a notorious Texas outlaw during Reconstruction. He followed with “The Friends of Pancho Villa” (1996), set during the Mexican Revolution.
“The enigmatic spectacle of war is well captured by Blake in this work with a lyrical intensity that marks him as a major writer,” a reviewer for The Miami Herald said about Mr. Blake’s second novel. “We see not only the revolution but also the people at the forefront of the struggle in all their faults and triumphs.”
To Mr. Blake, violence was a muse.
“Violence is the most elemental truth of life,” he told GQ magazine in 2012. “It’s the central shaper of history, the ultimate determiner of whether A or B is going to get his way. When push comes to shove — as so much has a way of doing — all moral considerations go out the window and it all becomes a matter of who’s going to be the last man standing.”
Mr. Blake achieved a kind of apex in literary savageness with “In the Rogue Blood,” his 1997 novel about two brothers from Florida and the brutality they endure and execute during the Mexican-American War. After they kill their father, one brother joins a gang that scalps Apaches. The other joins Mexican forces.
“Shifting between the brothers’ parallel stories, Blake offers a virtual encyclopedia of graphic violence,” Kirkus Reviews said. “People are shot, clubbed, knifed, eviscerated, castrated, decapitated, impaled, flayed alive, hanged, scalped, dismembered, blown up and immolated.”
“In the Rogue Blood” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. Critics likened the subject matter and style of writing to “Blood Meridian,” Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel about a 14-year-old runaway swept up in violence among sadistic gangs on the Texas-Mexico border during the 1850s. Mr. Blake seemed destined for literary stardom.
“His fiction is polished and well researched, and the execution of his talent has grown with each book,” Jan Reid wrote in a Texas Monthly profile with the headline “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Next Cormac McCarthy.” “Literary westerns have enjoyed a vogue in recent years, and Blake already stands among the best explorers of our lost frontier.”
More novels soon followed. Stardom did not.
“He was a very important voice in American fiction, and he certainly had a lot of recognition regionally in Texas and the Southwest,” Morgan Entrekin, the president of Grove/Atlantic, one of Mr. Blake’s publishers, said in an interview. “But he never really reached that level of acclaim nationally.”
That was probably due at least in part to his literary aspirations, something that can shrink the size of a writer’s audience.
“He’s not writing pure plot-driven genre books,” Mr. Entrekin said. “He’s writing something that’s more subtle, more layered and more resonant. There’s more ambition there.”
James Carlos Blake was born on May 26, 1943, in Tampico, Mexico. His father, Carlos Sebastian Blake, the son of a colonel in the Mexican Army, was a civil engineer who specialized in building roads. His mother, Estrella (Lozano) Blake, the daughter of a Mexican horse farmer, was raised in Brownsville, a Texas border town.
The couple met at a dance hall and settled in Tampico. James had a twin brother, though he didn’t know that until he was 6 years old. It was a secret his grandmother told him.
“A maid had been carrying him to our crib when he slipped from her arms and broke his skull on the tile floor,” he later wrote in an essay for The New York Times. “Mamá Concha said my mother had nearly gone crazy with grief, and she had never since spoken of my twin.”
His parents wanted him and his future siblings to be educated in the United States, so they moved to Brownsville in the early 1950s. In school, picked on by other students because of his Mexican heritage, he fought often.
“It taught me — though I didn’t know it till years later — that without physical courage you can have no other kind,” he told GQ.
After James completed fourth grade, the family moved to Florida, near the Everglades, where James worked as a snake catcher during his teenage years. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and became a paratrooper after graduating from high school.
After his service, he studied English at the University of South Florida and earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He then worked a succession of part-time jobs while publishing short stories in Glimmer Train, Quarterly West and other literary magazines.
In his later years, he wrote a series of crime novels about the Wolfes, a family of outlaws who operated along the Texas-Mexico border.
Mr. Blake lived in Tucson, Ariz., for many years. In 2021, after he suffered serious head injuries from a fall, his brother Rick moved him to Florida so he could help take care of him.
In addition to Rick, his survivors include another brother, Edgar, and a sister, Christina Lucas.
Mr. Blake was once asked what it was like to be compared to Cormac McCarthy.
“That was embarrassing as hell,” he told The New York Times in 2013. “No serious writer likes to be compared, but it’s nice to be compared to the best.”